Hollywood

A Hollywood Elusive

With all Cate Blanchett has on her plate—three young boys, a three-stage theater, and a global acting career—she might be forgiven the occasional emotional outburst or diva-like moment. Instead, the author encounters a Hollywood anomaly: a star who doesn’t do drama offscreen, whose only hint of domestic conflict is her husband’s threat to divorce her if she gets cosmetic surgery, and whose latest role, as Brad Pitt’s soulmate in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has her focused on aging and death.

Cate Blanchett, wearing Nina Ricci, channels a Chekhov heroine backstage at Sydney Theatre; she and her husband, Andrew Upton, are the artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; styled by Michael Roberts.

When David Fincher first saw Cate Blanchett play the Virgin Queen, a decade ago, he was stunned. “I remember coming out of Elizabeth and thinking, Who is this?!” the director says. “I didn’t know who she was, but that power from someone in relative obscurity was like seeing her leaping fully realized from the head of Zeus.”

That performance won the Australian actress her first Academy Award nomination and launched a remarkable career. During the years that followed, no one could have accused her of playing it safe with typecasting. From the elf queen Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator to the tour de force impersonation of an androgynous version of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, Blanchett has chosen challenging parts and won rafts of awards, including a 2004 Oscar for best supporting actress for The Aviator.

So many of her roles have left an indelible imprint that meeting Blanchett is a peculiar experience whose real import becomes clear only afterward, when you start to feel as if some kind of magic trick has been played on you. At first, nothing seems amiss, except that the 39-year-old actress is surprisingly dewy and fresh-faced for someone who just stepped off a long flight from Australia to spend a few hours in Los Angeles before flying on to Chicago, where she’s scheduled to tape Oprah. Although Blanchett is deep in rehearsal for her stage commitments back home in Sydney, she’s making a quick round-trip to the United States to promote Fincher’s new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which opens on Christmas Day.

Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born old and ages in reverse, growing ever younger, the movie stars Brad Pitt as the hapless Benjamin Button and Blanchett as the love of his life, a red-haired dancer with whom passion must be confined to a heartbreakingly brief interlude in the middle of Button’s own time warp. The film marks the third collaboration between Pitt and Fincher, who also directed him in Se7en and Fight Club.

Weeks before its opening, Benjamin Button already had tongues wagging; although Fincher claims he brought it in “under budget,” the film is believed to have cost up to $175 million—an enormous gamble for a story about those festive subjects aging and death, not to mention a movie whose expensive special effects don’t even include spectacular explosions, car crashes, or superhero derring-do.

Instead, the technological wizardry has been devoted to the extraordinary challenge of enabling the movie’s handsome star to spend most of his screen time as a shrunken elderly man or a small child, with Pitt’s own strapping self limited to a fleeting handful of scenes late in the film. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump, a consummate crowd-pleaser. Early signs of the critical reception for Benjamin Button were encouraging; in December it received a Golden Globe nomination for best dramatic picture, along with nominations for Pitt for best actor in a drama, Fincher for best director, Roth for screenplay, and a fifth nod for best original score. But as its release date approached, *Benjamin Button—*a sprawling epic set in New Orleans that begins in 1918; ends with Hurricane Katrina, nearly a century later; runs close to three hours long; and was filmed in Louisiana, Canada, the Caribbean, Cambodia, and India, along with Los Angeles—promised to be a nail-biter for everyone involved.

And yet Blanchett looks serenely unruffled by such concerns. Today she’s back to being a blonde, an ethereally pale wraith wearing a silky slip of a blouse, a pristine blazer, and high-heeled pumps that are all the equally pale, luminous pink of the inside of a seashell. She’s so slender you’d never guess she had a baby last spring, so calm and unhurried you might think she had nothing else to do but sit around having tea at the Hotel Bel-Air. Intelligent and well mannered, she answers questions obligingly and shows photographs of her three small children on request.

But the portrait of Blanchett that emerges from several hours of conversation seems to be sketched in invisible ink; it starts to fade as soon as she’s gone, and it quickly disappears from view. As compelling as she is on-screen, in real life she can be restrained and self-effacing to the point of blandness. It turns out that her most memorable qualities define themselves by their absence, because so much of what you might expect isn’t there.

No diva-esque drama; none of the narcissistic self-centeredness that so many actors exude like a noxious perfume. No attitude; no histrionics. No vapid I’m-a-star-so-I-don’t-have-to-know-what’s-going-on-in-the-world empty-headedness; she’s eager to discuss her commitment to greening the Sydney Theatre Company, where she and her husband are the artistic directors. But there are no flagrant insecurities or neuroses on display, no gut-wrenching excavations of past trauma, heartbreak, or injustice. No bizarre lapses, no emotional outbursts, no embarrassing missteps. No poignant or hilarious war stories about making this movie or appearing in that play. No well-rehearsed anecdotes of any kind, in fact.

Most striking of all is an absence of the intense laser-focused charm that stars and politicians turn on and off as if flipping a switch; Blanchett seems to lack their reflexive need to make everyone love them. As an actress, her elastic face provides a blank canvas for a dazzling range of transformations that are facilitated by the egoless state she strives to achieve in the name of “fluidity.” In person, she is willing to sit and answer questions; she is cordial and cooperative; but you have the feeling she might actually be thinking about the weather, and perhaps she’d just as soon be folding laundry.

Like many veteran stage actors, Blanchett is the consummate professional, although she never manifests the “I’m a thespian!” grandiosity that often comes with the territory. “She’s just so smart, capable, facile, thoughtful, beautiful, and emotionally present,” Fincher says. “She helps you as a director in so many different ways, coming up with ideas you may not have thought of. She’s going to come having done her homework; she’s done all the thinking, and it’s deep and measured. She has a great work ethic, knowing her lines and knowing everyone else’s lines. She prides herself on making things work. She’ll say, ‘Well, I see you’ve given me eight words here, so how about this?’ She’s not one of those people who says, ‘I need a soliloquy—someone’s going to have to come in and retool this.’ She’s the prototype of what you would want to have.”

Resplendent in a John Galliano gown, Blanchett as Cleopatra reclines at the Set Construction Workshop. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; styled by Michael Roberts.

None of which would be exceptional if Blanchett were someone else—but given who she is, her unpretentious, low-key approach seems noteworthy. How many Academy Award–winning movie stars succeed in maintaining a stable, enduring marriage with a professional colleague while building such a stellar career, not to mention raising children away from the paparazzi and keeping everyone’s ups and downs out of the headlines? Blanchett has been married for 11 years to Andrew Upton, an Australian playwright, screenwriter, and director, but their relationship provides quite a contrast with the international dramas generated by Pitt and Angelina Jolie. With the Uptons, there are no scandals, no muss and fuss. So far, there have been no harrowing replays of A Star Is Born. Whatever dark dramas might lurk behind closed doors, they haven’t been splashed all over the tabloids. “She’s a private person,” Fincher says.

Although Benjamin Button marks the second time Blanchett has co-starred with Pitt, it would have been the first if the film had not had such a long and tortured history; Fincher says it’s been in the works for seven years, including two years of shooting and postproduction. “We were talking about this before we made Babel, but that got made very quickly,” Blanchett explains.

She was drawn to Benjamin Button by the very elements that have caused studio executives to agonize about the open question of its commercial appeal. “David said, ‘This film is about death,’ and I think it’s great,” she says. “We’ve enshrined the purity, sanctity, value, and importance of bringing children into the world, yet we don’t discuss death. There used to be an enshrined period where mourning was a necessary part of going through the process of grieving; death wasn’t considered morbid or antisocial. But that’s totally gone. Now we’re all terrified of aging, terrified of death. This film deals with death as a release. I hope it’s a moment of catharsis.”

“It’s sort of like a repository for your grief, about whatever you grieve about—the loss of loved ones, the missing of opportunities, whatever,” Fincher adds. “You hope it will leave people feeling hopeful about certain things, and sad about certain things.”

The opposing narrative arcs of the story, in which Benjamin gets “younger” every year while his true love ages from 6 to 86, force the couple into an ever changing succession of relationships with each other that encompass every life stage from birth to death. “If you age with somebody, you go through so many roles—you’re lovers, friends, enemies, colleagues, strangers; you’re brother and sister,” Blanchett observes. “That’s what intimacy is, if you’re with your soulmate. Marriage is a risk; I think it’s a great and glorious risk, as long as you embark on the adventure in the same spirit.”

The intersection of marriage and death is a poignant subject for Blanchett. Her father, a Texas-born advertising executive, married an Australian teacher and settled in Melbourne, but he had his first heart attack at 32 and died at 40, leaving his 39-year-old widow to raise their three children on her own. And yet Cate’s memories of that trauma seem curiously detached. “The night of the day he died, I thought, Wow—I’m up so late, and I haven’t eaten all day,” she recalls. “It’s hard to compute something so massive. I just sort of rolled with it. You sort of see it from other people’s perspective. I could see that my sister was so young, and I felt it was tragic that she might not remember him. I could see how it affected my brother, who was 11 or 12. I saw what a struggle it was for my mother. I think about my father and how sad it was that he never had grandchildren.”

But she utters not a word about her own grief. “Maybe this is just me trying to live with the loss,” she says, her tone affectless.

That loss left her with an enduring sense that “the presence of death can coexist in life. I just don’t take things for granted. I know that time is very short.”

She does not have the consolation of believing in an afterlife: “I wish I did; it would be really comforting. But I don’t think we’re that important.” She does, however, ponder “that whole notion in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that life is paving the way for a good death.”

She sighs. “I hope it isn’t a car park.”

In any case, the fact that Upton has reached the age of 42 is a source of inordinate relief to his wife. “When my husband turned 40, I was obsessed,” she admits. “Has he had his medical checkup? He needed to go to the doctor; he needed to go to the dentist. Any little cough, I was really on him. Then he turned 40, and I thought, Maybe that’s why I’ve been so obsessed with his health!”

As a child, Blanchett discovered the pleasures of playacting long before her father died, but she never intended to make it her career. “Acting was fun, but I don’t think it crossed my mind that I could do it,” she says. “I thought the most important thing was security, because of my mother; it was insecure bringing up three children by herself. I thought, I want to do something more practical, so I decided to study economics and fine arts.”

But she found she couldn’t get away from acting, and after a brief stint at the University of Melbourne and time off for traveling, she ended up studying in Sydney at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. “It was inescapable,” she says. “I loved the looseness and freedom. Some ideas, like what you’re going to do with your life, take time to form. When something is a vocation, you don’t really make a decision about it.”

She describes her commitment to Upton as a similarly irresistible force. They got to know each other in 1996 while working on the Australian film Thank God He Met Lizzie, but it was hardly love at first sight: “It was kind of animosity at first,” Blanchett says. “It was a bit like Beatrice and Benedict.”

And yet when they finally got involved, Upton asked her to marry him within a few weeks. Why did she say yes? “I couldn’t not,” she says. “We were in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. He turned to me after a few days and said, ‘Cate … ,’ and I thought, Oh, god, he’s going to ask me to marry him—and I’m going to have to say yes! He didn’t, in fact; he asked me what I wanted for dinner or something like that. But I’d never had that thought before. I thought, This is extraordinary! I’ve never felt this before. What an adventure! It was a leap, but I wasn’t leaping by myself. It was a leap into the future.”

That leap was motivated in part by Blanchett’s astonishment at finding someone who could share her creative life. “I don’t think I had ever discussed work with anybody until I met him,” she says. “He’s a really constructive critic. I think he’s a truly independent thinker.”

As for Upton, he says simply, “We sort of clicked. With other people, maybe they don’t get you. But with someone who does, you go, ‘Ooh—I’m got! Someone’s got me!’ It’s a relief and a pleasure.”

Their life together is dauntingly full. Even as Blanchett ricocheted around the world making films, she managed to have two sons—seven-year-old Dashiell and Roman, who is four. And last April she delivered her third child, Ignatius, whose nickname is Iggy and whose brothers call him Piglet. Three little boys might seem rather a lot for an actress who is already managing a global acting career and a theater with three stages, but Blanchett appears as cool and collected about her burgeoning family as she is about everything else. “We don’t mind a bit of chaos,” she says. “As your life becomes more populated with little people, you have to adapt, but I’ve never been frightened of change.”

She doesn’t even rule out more babies. “Who knows?” she says breezily. “Don’t close those doors. The world is very overpopulated, but we do make nice ones. They all look like Andrew. To say he has dominant genes would be an understatement.”

As a mother, Blanchett is “very hands-on” with the boys, her husband says. “They’re part of everything we do. Fortunately the kids can come into the theater; it’s very child-friendly.”

Their family was a major reason the Uptons signed a three-year contract with Australia’s leading theater. “Andrew had worked closely with the company, and when the idea came up he was wondering if it was something we wanted to do together,” Blanchett says. “The opportunity presented itself, and it would have been utter cowardice to say no, because the challenge was so great. The excitement of being in the theater when it’s really pumping—that’s a visceral part of our lives.”

As is Australia; the Uptons had lived in London and Brighton for the previous nine years, but the Sydney offer coincided with a growing desire to return home. “It was parallel with wanting to raise our kids in Australia,” Blanchett explains. “The plan is not to travel as much. I wouldn’t want to work at the pace I’ve worked at for the last couple of years; it’s creative cannibalism. But doing Hedda Gabler at bam [Brooklyn Academy of Music], directing Blackbird, playing Bob Dylan and [Queen] Elizabeth—that was an extraordinary set of opportunities.”

So are the ones she is juggling now. Blanchett is currently in rehearsal for an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses cycle, an eight-hour opus that includes “Richard II, all the Henrys, and Richard III,” she says. The production will begin as part of the Sydney Festival in January, with Blanchett herself playing Richard II and Lady Anne.

After that, she says, “I think I just want to garden—or kill some plants, in my case.” But that’s clearly a fantasy; plans call for her to play Blanche in a Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Liv Ullmann, which will arrive in Washington next October and at bam in November. And then? “I’ll just wait for the next irresistible thing,” Blanchett says.

As for the theater itself, its directors see other imperatives. “The most important thing to achieve will be a generational change in the audiences,” Upton reports. “From the older generation, there’s a slightly medicinal quality to the approach to culture, which is that it’s good for you and will make you a better person—which I think is a kind of turnoff. We’re hoping to take a more joyous approach.”

Blanchett and Upton also expect to trade off responsibilities to accommodate the demands of their respective careers. “If Cate’s in rehearsal for a play, I’m probably picking up more of the administration, but there isn’t that much, really, because there’s a general manager,” Upton explains. “If I’m on a writing job, Cate will pick up the slack. As a married couple, we’re kind of used to coordinating with each other. It’s been very interesting; she’s an interesting person to be in close proximity to. But she doesn’t overcomplicate things. She has a very strong, simple process; she breaks things down and asks the right questions. That’s a great thing to be around; I’m probably more blind than that. But she moves the target so my bullet hits.”

Although the job-sharing arrangement they have chosen could easily prove explosive with a less compatible couple, the Uptons seem to bring a sensible perspective to its potential for testing their marriage. Blanchett says her husband is “the strongest man I know. He’s got a very strong sense of self. He’s married to a woman who, at the moment, is in a noisy phase in her career. But he’s also been with me when it’s not that noisy, and he knows there’s not a lot of difference in me, or in us. I’m incredibly lucky to be with someone like that. Because my face is more recognized than his, there’s a reverse sexism; somehow his career path is seen as more dispensable, less important. That’s just garbage. I have deep respect for what he does, and likewise. If I was a theater actor, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

As Blanchett approaches her 40th birthday, next May, aging is likely to provide yet another challenge, but she claims not to worry about its impact. “I don’t think about it a lot,” she says. Nor does she acknowledge much interest in Hollywood’s obsession with fighting time; although many actresses love to dish about cosmetic surgery and who’s doing what, Blanchett seems bored by the whole subject.

“I haven’t done anything, but who knows,” she says. “Andrew said he’d divorce me if I did anything. When you’ve had children, your body changes; there’s history to it. I like the evolution of that history; I’m fortunate to be with somebody who likes the evolution of that history. I think it’s important to not eradicate it. I look at someone’s face and I see the work before I see the person. I personally don’t think people look better when they do it; they just look different. You’re certainly not staving off the inevitable. And if you’re doing it out of fear, that fear’s still going to be seen through your eyes. The windows to your soul, they say.”

She shrugs, her eyes betraying no fear. “But I’m not a spokesperson against the world of injectables. If you grow up in an environment where your mother gets you a boob job when you turn 18, what hope is there? But I didn’t grow up in that world. The reason I went to train as an actor was that I was interested in it for the long haul. You can become very self-obsessed, but you’ve got to keep looking outward.”

Blanchett is clearly a believer in the importance of rigorous self-discipline, both in maintaining a career and in keeping a level head about it. “Someone might have a germ of talent, but 90 percent of it is discipline and how you practice it, what you do with it,” she says. “Instinct won’t carry you through the entire journey. It’s what you do in the moments between inspiration.”

In any case, practicing her craft is only part of the picture for Blanchett, who has always maintained a careful distance from Hollywood. “I don’t exist in that world,” she says. “I observe it, but there’s so much else to be thinking about. Maybe it’s because I’m with someone who’s not with me because of that; I’m not a trophy. He likes the vessel, but he also wants to make sure the vessel is full. The world of film can be so noisy, but the other aspects of my life are actually the noisiest parts of my life. My best friends are a social worker and a visual artist.”

Indeed, Blanchett seems to register Hollywood’s ruthless calculus of success and failure at a considerable remove, as if observing the quaint customs of some primitive tribe. “I didn’t set out to get somewhere,” she says. “I thought it might be nice to work. But you just have to have a very accurate internal barometer with your own finger as the dial pointing to success and failure. The film industry is so noisy you have to find little quiet places to keep experimenting—otherwise, exit stage left. But the noise doesn’t interest me; the work does.”

At the moment, her opportunities seem to be multiplying rather than diminishing. For both Blanchett and her husband, the commitment to the Sydney Theatre Company represents “a way of getting in deeper to the work you came from and, without getting pompous about it, giving something back to what you came from,” Upton says. “With Cate, there’s a degree of re-investigation of what brought her to the theater and to acting in the first place. You can never know where that’s going to lead. Cate’s enjoyed directing; she’s good at it, but I don’t know if she’ll go down that path. It may be a refueling, and she’ll go down the route of the great grande-dame roles. She’s in a period of re-investigation, leading—who knows where.”

In the meantime, the new job is requiring some adjustments. “We’re very private people, but we’ve entered into running a large state theater company,” Blanchett says. “It’s a public position, so when there are certain cultural debates, one can’t just hold a personal position; you’re expected to participate in that debate. It’s quite exposing. I get sick of the sound of my own voice, to tell you the truth. I don’t want to ram my opinion down other people’s throats. I think I was a bit of a loudmouth in my time at university; I was that cliché, opinionated but not very interesting, ultimately.”

These days she strives for something else: “I want to be in a dialogue, not a monologue.” She snorts derisively. “Says she, talking for two hours to Vanity Fair.” And then, her ego firmly in check, she exits, stage left, leaving not even a whiff of attitude behind.